An overview of language anxiety research and trends in its development

Abstract

It is safe to say that language anxiety has been the most widely studied emotion in SLA, perhaps because it is both an intense and frequent experience. For the purposes of this review, the research literature on language anxiety will be broken into three broad approaches, reflecting both historical trends and assumptions about the topic. The first might be called the Confounded Approach because the ideas about anxiety and their effect on language learning were adopted from a mixture of various sources without detailed consideration of the meaning of the anxiety concept for language learners. The second trend might be called the Specialized Approach wherein anxiety experiences that were specifically associated with language were identified, defined and studied. A third, relatively recent line of research reflects a contextualized Dynamic Approach in which anxiety is studied in connection with a complex web of language experiences. Although these are fuzzy categories, they help to organize the issues as research into language anxiety has developed.